


Layers

by Sunhawk16



Series: Layers [1]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:43:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14772473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunhawk16/pseuds/Sunhawk16
Summary: This was posted in 2015 for Thanksgiving... going ahead and posting since the sequel just went up.  :D





	Layers

**Author's Note:**

> This was posted in 2015 for Thanksgiving... going ahead and posting since the sequel just went up. :D

The drive home had been a little… quiet. I’d let that sleeping dog of questionable disposition lie during the trip, because highway 32 at rush hour hadn’t seemed the time for an in depth conversation.

Worming something out of Heero can sometimes be a delicate operation, but it’s mostly a matter of timing. So I bided that time through the driving part, and the arriving part, and the swapping of tuxes for regular clothes part. That part usually tends to ease a mood all by itself… those things are just ridiculously uncomfortable, but that odd quiet continued to follow us around like a grumpy cloud.

I took my cues from Heero and was heartened that he didn’t immediately retreat to his backyard garden plot to hunt down weeds to decimate and tomato worms to behead. Always a clear and respected message to be left the hell alone.

But there wasn’t any gusty sigh followed by an offer of what the bad mood was all about either. Not that I didn’t know. So once he settled himself in ‘his’ spot in the living room, I retrieve the two bottles of Perrier I’d had stashed in the bottom of the fridge just for this day, and joined him.

He snorted softly when I handed him his bottle and I got the raised eyebrow of question.

‘Thought it was time we stopped wondering what the stuff tasted like, and just found out,’ I said, uncapping my bottle and raising it in salute.

It had been a thing that came up in conversation every once in awhile ever since he’d read something about his favorite author having an affection for the stuff. I kind of wondered if the term shouldn’t be more like affectation, but of course, I didn’t know the guy. At any rate, today had seemed like a good day to have a few bottles on hand. An ice breaker, so to speak.

He took a cautious sip while I sniffed at mine. I couldn’t tell from his face, so I followed his cautious sip with one of my own. It was rather… under-whelming.

‘Kind of tastes like club soda,’ Heero offered after a second try.

‘Really not what I was expecting,’ I admitted, and we shared a rueful grin at ourselves. He went back for a third taste while I capped my bottle and set it aside. ‘Kind of… disappointing, really.’

He grunted, but ignored the hint of direction change in my tone.

‘Sort of that kind of day, I suppose,’ I said.

I gave him two full minutes, but there was nothing more forth-coming, I could tell. The opening was there, the lead in to another topic was wide open. But no… we were apparently going to do this the hard way.

‘It was a beautiful wedding,’ I ventured and watched those grumpy clouds settle around his head.

‘If you like that sort of over-blown spectacle,’ he said rather flatly.

‘Well, the media certainly liked it,’ I said and all it made him do was cap his own bottle, but he didn’t set it aside, just sat looking at the label.

I let him read the whole front of the bottle before I went in with the crux of the matter.

‘Kai is a good guy, Heero.’

Kai is a wimp,’ he returned, looking up at me without raising his head. It gave him the aspect of looking out from under the storm cloud. It was meant to intimidate. It probably would have shut just about anybody else up, but it’s hard to be intimated by a guy after you’ve seen him rescuing baby birds after a hard rain. At three a.m. In his boxers.

‘He married Relena, he didn’t sign on to be her body guard,’ I said gently and he turned the bottle to read the label on the back.

‘Good thing,’ he muttered, leaving me with not a lot to work with.

I picked my own bottle back up, taking another sip to cover the fact that I just wanted to see what had him so fascinated, only to discover there really wasn’t much of anything there.

I sighed. I sat the bottle down… it really wasn’t good stuff. I leaned forward. I watched him sit and stare at nothing for a bit. I chose words. I discarded words. I thought about the whole day.

‘She’s still our friend,’ I finally told him and he gave me another look without raising his head.  
Just not the intimidating one. More like the little boy one. That one works better on me than the other one.

‘He hates me,’ I was told, ‘you think that won’t have an effect on our relationship with Relena?’

‘I don’t think he hates you, exactly,’ I said, picking around words again. ‘You just scare the crap out of him…’

He cut me off with a snort, setting his bottle aside and looking up at me for real finally. Maybe facing up to the fact that I wasn’t letting him out of this conversation.

‘I kicked his ass back in school in front of Relena's entire squad of hangers-on… guys don’t get over things like that.’

It was my turn to snort, so I did, and then followed it up with a wide grin.

‘The first time we met, I shot you, and you got over that.’

I won a short little chuckle and we shared another look that was somewhere in the neighborhood of that earlier rueful. Just a couple of houses down.

But I lost the faint amusement when I realized he was counting the chuckle as his response in the conversation. The jerk.

‘Of course there will be some adjustments,’ I said, ‘but Relena is not going to let this kill her relationship with us. And neither will I.’

The storm clouds over his head rallied and there might even have been a tiny spark of lightening.

‘She married him,’ he grumped, like it had been a thing that happened just to affront him personally. ‘You don’t marry someone unless you’re making a solid commitment to put that person first.’

I kind of stumbled over that in the conversational game of catch, and wasn’t quite sure why. There were a lot of layers there, but on examination, those layers weren’t so easily peeled.

I opened my mouth with a return, but felt a shadow pass over me and realized I’d developed my own storm cloud. I closed my mouth; never pays to have two storm fronts clash into one another.

I picked up my barely touched bottle of weird water and stood. ‘I’m going to start dinner,’ I informed him, ignoring completely the part where we’d just come from a lavish reception and our next meal should have been breakfast.

Ignored his questioning look too. Heero has his garden… I have my kitchen.

My storm cloud followed me and somewhere between the living room and the kitchen… It began to drizzle.

I stashed the Perrier in the fridge and stood staring at what I had to work with in the cooking department. Dinner was really a stupid idea, and I wasn’t so lost in the mist that I didn’t darn well know that, so I changed gears and went for the crock pot. I could still do my brood-cooking…. I’d just do it a day ahead.

So me, a pile of potatoes, and a peeler set out to peek under the layers of that last line.

There was no denying the weird little bee sting of … something, that had caused me to blow the catch-and-return in the other room. I just needed a second to identify the something.

Layers. It was half what he’d said, and half the way he’d said it. Was I… jealous? He seemed just a little bit too upset over this marriage. Was it really just his fear of losing a friendship, or was it that he was regretting rebuffing Relena’s advances all those years ago?

I reran the earlier nuptials and substituted Heero in Kai’s place and the sharpening of the sting in my chest was proof enough that I could imagine it.

Of course, imagining it and it being a possible reality were too different things. An image flitted through my mind of trying to kiss Relena and I shuddered, sending water drops flying. Too much like a sister. I ran through all the women I knew, finally settling on the front desk receptionist at work that all the other guys said was ‘hot enough to peel the paint off your barn door’, whatever the hell that meant. But she didn’t work either. I was most definitely gay. But what about Heero? It had never been a topic of conversation since the dating part all those years ago had made the question a moot point.

Hadn’t really cared about the nuances before.

I went back over to the kitchen doorway where I could see him still sitting in the living room, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, dripping water as I went. Heero looked up at me, a faintly confused expression on his face.

‘Hey Heero,’ I said, ‘gay or bi?’

His confused expression ratcheted up a couple of notches. ‘Gay,’ he confirmed and I nodded and went back to the sink.

Ok, so it wasn’t that he was regretting the partner he’d chosen. He wasn’t pining over the one he let get away. Hadn’t been fantasizing the end scene in Mrs. Robinson during the ceremony.

Did that ease the bee sting? Some, but it wasn’t gone.

So the whole conversation hadn’t been about Relena? No… that wasn’t right. His part of the conversation had been, but I’m not so sure my part had. At least, not all of it.

Great… So this was my problem?

I chunked potatoes into the crock pot and ran water over them.

My storm cloud followed me to the fridge on my quest for carrots.

‘You don’t marry someone unless you’re making a solid commitment to put that person first.’

Yeah, that was it. There was the sting. And it was all me.

Heero and I are not married. We’ve been a couple for a long time, and lived together for years, but… We are not married. It was not a thing we’d ever discussed and to be honest; not something I’d ever given much thought to before. So I really didn’t have a clue why I had a stupid bee sting in the middle of my chest that I kept wanting to rub at.

The carrots were cleaned and chopped, but there needed to be something more. I went questing in the fridge again.

I probed at the bee sting, made sure the stinger was pulled out, and thought about it really hard. Had I been feeling jealous all day? Had I been upset and just not acknowledging it? Had there been melancholy behind my toast at the wedding?

I really didn’t think so. If I had, it had been buried deep. I didn’t think this was something I’d been harboring any deep seated yearning over. The wedding itself had not been some bizarre catalyst for a sudden case of the vapors.

I couldn’t find a damn thing in the fridge that looked like it ought to go into a crock pot full of beef stew. I went ahead and pulled out the meat and went back to the kitchen door.

‘Hey Heero,’ I said, ‘would you marry me if it came down to it?’

His earlier ratcheted confused expression went right on up to bewildered. ‘What? But we are. I mean… I… yes.’

The bee sting just sort of went away. Perspective.

‘Do you have any tomatoes out in that jungle of yours that are ripe,’ I asked, ‘and are the peas ready yet?’

He blinked at me for a whole twenty seconds before telling me he’d have to check.

He rose to go out to the garden, and I went back to the kitchen to sear the meat.

I had time to rinse the potatoes and carrots, add the meat and wash the frying pan before he came back in with his little basket.

He was hesitant, invading my domain, but the request for ingredients had been a clear invitation, so he began shelling peas into the pot while I washed the tomatoes.

Time to retrack the conversation I’d derailed down my side junction.

‘Relena is a pretty strong personality,’ I said. ‘She loves us, and she won’t let her new marital status interfere with any of her old relationships.’

There was a sigh in between the little plips of peas hitting the water. ‘I know,’ he conceded. ‘I just… really don’t like him.’

Another layer? Was this as much about Heero being forced to spend time with Kai as it was Kai forcing Relena to spend less time with her old friends?

Not much I could do about that one. ‘You’ll get used to him.’

‘He’s just such a…’ he began, but hesitated. Maybe because he’d already said it.

‘Wimp?’ I supplied with a chuckle, because while I didn’t have the history with the guy that Heero did, I won’t pretend I was his biggest fan. I just seemed to be more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on Relena’s say so.

Heero snorted and finished sending peas to their watery grave, gathering the empty pods back into his little basket to dispose of in the compost heap.

‘Am I not allowed to be pissy?’ he smirked, and I noticed that his little storm cloud seemed to have broken up and moved on. ‘Wufei was pissy for six months before he got used to us as a couple.’

I grinned at the memory… talk about storm clouds!

‘He didn’t so much get used to us as a couple as we proved we weren’t going to change how we acted around him,’ I explained.

Heero stopped and looked up at me, his confusion back. ‘How we acted?’

‘He was afraid there was going to be a lot of… public displays of affection or… something.’

The confusion cleared, but left a vague look in its place I couldn’t quite work out.

The storm clouds tried to regroup. ‘Ew,’ he said, and I saw where his mind had gone. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Yeah, the odds that Relena would be more apt to tend toward public displays than Heero and I were… pretty high.

He took his empty pea pods and went outside with them. I put the crock pot in the fridge and retreated to the living room to see if I could find something on the television for the evening. Maybe a nice documentary on wombats or something.

When Heero returned, his little basket returned to its place in the utility room and hands washed of dirt, he settled in beside me, slipping an arm around me so that I leaned against him and I found the remote plucked from my hand. I didn’t object, I’d been looking for something with him in mind anyway. Wasn’t a night for one of my sci-fi classic marathons.

I was beyond surprised when he went straight for the news channel, because we both knew what the top story of the night was going to be.

He seemed to pick one of the channels at random and we were treated to a discourse on wedding gowns. We sat through about a minute and a half of a slide-show of ‘gowns of the Royalty’ for the last hundred years, before he switched.

I thought Relena’s was far and away the most sensible of the lot, but what the hell do I know about wedding gowns?

The next station was more interested in the top secret honeymoon plans and speculating locations and time frames and we watched that long enough to assure ourselves that nobody was even coming close to guessing.

Heero flipped again, and the next station showed more promise. We were getting actual footage from the wedding itself and the commentary had more to do with Sanc history than fashion. After a few minutes, he hit the mute button and we watched Relena and Kai, and… embarrassingly, ourselves, move about the stage of history.

They spent some time on Relena’s slow walk down the aisle, and Kai at the front of the church waiting with the rest of the wedding party. I’d been kind of surprised when Relena had asked Heero to be her best man. But Kai had balanced it all out by having his sister be his maid of honor, and most people probably didn’t know who was standing up there for whose benefit anyway. Kai didn’t have a lot of guy friends, and Relena didn’t really have any girl friends and it had all worked out in the end. Even if the look on Heero’s face in most of the footage was… slightly less than the grinning happy glow everybody else had.

Beside me, Heero sighed.

It sounded like his slightly embarrassed sigh, so I patted his knee.

On the screen, there was a close up of Kai’s face and the man was positively bursting with pride. He really did glow. Grinning widely, blushing hotly, eyes alight as he watched his childhood crush walking toward him… I had thought at the time he was going to faint.

Then Relena joined him and they stood there glowing and grinning at each other and watching them the second time around, without the distraction of the tight collar and the hot cumberbund and the too new shoes… the emotion of the whole thing was kind of hard to miss.

Heero sighed again. A sort of resigned kind of sound.

‘He really does love her,’ he said and I just nodded, because I knew what an admission it was, and figured he ought to have a minute to come to grips with it.

With the sound still off, he flipped on up through the channels, and we watched some of the same clips from a dozen different angles, along with some new footage from the reception. We watched their first dance, we watched Heero dance with Kai’s sister, and me dance with Relena. We watched some aerial shots of Sanc in the throes of the grandest party ever thrown there. We watched some clips from Zechs’ wedding, thrown in for comparisons sake. And when Heero had had enough, we settled on a nice documentary on asteroid mining.

But he left the sound off.

‘You aren’t going to want anything that flashy, are you?’ Heero asked after a bit, and since the scene on the television was a rather dark and shadowed close up of a rock, I guessed we were still on the other topic.

‘God no,’ I shuddered, wondering who in the hell would make the long gallows walk and who would stand and fidget. ‘I was thinking Vegas.’

He chuckled because he knew me well enough to know that wasn’t even on the agenda. ‘I was thinking trip to the courthouse.’

‘How about we find something comfortably in between?’

‘With maybe three or four of our closest friends?’ he offered and I had to look up to see the glint of mischief in his eyes.

‘Four or five, jerk,’ I corrected. ‘Relena’s married now.’

‘Doesn’t mean we have to invite him…’


End file.
